BA in Global Cultural Studies - Film and Media Concentration

The Literature Program is offering the option of a “Film and Media” concentration as part of its Major in Global Cultural Studies. The “Film and Media” concentration provides an interdisciplinary framework for the critical study of visual, aural, and tactile media central to global culture today. Since the first recorded photograph taken by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826, technical media have played a fundamental role in shaping modern society. Following the invention of photography and of phonography in the 19th century, technical media have grown exponentially in the 20th and now into the 21st centuries, from the invention of cinema and its global success to the expansion of image forms and medial experience that has resulted from the proliferation of computation in today’s global society. The Literature Program is home to a number of leading scholars in the field of technical media, who address the very idea of the “medium” as a complex dynamic construct that has allowed for both new experiences and new creative and social possibilities. The Film and Media concentration will offer students the opportunity to study media in all of its complexity – as a social, technical, historical, and industrial process of communication that is central to the processes of modernization and globalization. Graduates with this concentration will gain the necessary skills for a wide range of careers, including work in the cinema and media industries, the commercial cinema and the film festival circuit, cultural and governmental organizations (in the fields of the arts, communication, conservation, heritage, etc.), specialized and online publishing and journalism, and the creative arts. The concentration will also prepare students for highly competitive graduate programs in film and media studies for a continued academic career in the discipline.